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HOLYDAYS PAST AND PRESENT
When I was a small girl of seven and eight years I went through my first experiences of having a jolly good and interesting holidays. The reason was the beginning of school in my life. Myself and my sister we had to get up around seven o'clock every morning, have our breakfast and put on all those thick clothes to meet the outside temperature of minus ten or fifteen. The school would begin at eight and we usually hurried on crackling frozen snow. After a ten minutes' walk we would see our school: a long, three-storied building all lit-up against the still blueish-dark morning sky. The school would be full of swerving boys and girls, most of them our acquaintances from the same residential area in Sarajevo. Powerful electric bells on every floor would finally bring silence and order in that school of mine. My sister and I knew that after every cold and frosty winter there will be another spring and summer in our lives. There will be that long two-and-half months long holidays of which at least one month would be spent at the gorgeous Adriatic Coast. And when the decision was passed in the family to leave for the coast there had to be done certain preparations like: washing caravan we trailed with our modest car, prepare all the suits and towels, take all the kitchen utensils anda hair cut for our big Irish setter. We were only 160 kilometers from the coast but the trip would last for at least five or six hours as the road was steep and dangerous. Our dreams would come true the very moment we would plunge in that clean but tepid water and stay there for hours. We would swim get tanned and after a month would be surprised to see changes on ourselves. We would breathe better and muscles would appear on our limbs. Once we stayed so long at the coast that our hair went sun-scortched to straw-coloured die. Yes, life was great at that period of our lives. At the end of our holidays we would spend a week or two in our country-house in green and calm mountains in endless strolls and one-day excursions picking up forest fruits and enjoying extraordinary and daring panoramic views of other mountains. Myself and my sister, we are over twenty now and we still go to school, or better to say University and we still believe to get the same award we were given years ago. We trust we shall succeed in that one of these days.
Julija Jelacic